Billy Jack Sams, the warm and steady presence known across central Arkansas simply as B.J., died on June 25, 2026, at the age of 91. For more than half a century he was a fixture of Arkansas television and radio, and for nearly three decades his was among the first faces families across the region saw each morning.

His path to the anchor desk began far from Little Rock, in the hills of East Tennessee, where he was born in 1935. As a teenager he took a job sweeping floors at a Knoxville radio station, and that humble start at seventy-five cents an hour soon led to a turn at the microphone. The young man who answered to the nickname "B.J. the DJ" had found his calling, according to the Arkansas Broadcasters Association. Drafted into the United States Army in 1958, he served as a broadcast specialist, recording newscasts for the military and sharpening the craft that would carry him through a broadcasting life eventually totaling roughly eleven years in radio and forty-five in television.

After roughly a decade on the radio, Sams moved into television, beginning with a short stint in Louisiana before arriving in Arkansas for the first time. He spent several years as a news co-anchor at KATV Channel 7 in Little Rock during the late 1960s, then carried his career across the Pacific to Honolulu, where he anchored the news at KHON-TV through much of the 1970s. In 1982 he returned to Arkansas for good, joining the Little Rock station that audiences would come to know as THV11 and settling into a community that would claim him as one of its own.

It was at THV11 that Sams became a household name. Over 27 years he anchored evening newscasts and later helped launch the station's morning program, where he was paired with co-anchor Robyn Richardson and chief meteorologist Tom Brannon. Together the trio built Today's THV This Morning into the highest-rated morning newscast in central Arkansas, holding the top spot for more than a decade and turning the early hours into an appointment that countless households kept day after day. His became one of the longest-tenured and most trusted voices in Arkansas broadcasting. In 2003 the station honored him by naming its primary studio the B.J. Sams Studio. He signed off for the last time in the summer of 2009, closing a broadcasting career that spanned more than fifty-five years, according to Arkansas Radio.

The accolades followed a life devoted to his craft. Sams was named Broadcaster of the Year in 2000 by the Associated Press and United Press International, and he received the Gold Circle honor from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for lifetime achievement. He was inducted into the Arkansas Entertainers Hall of Fame in 2007 and onto the Arkansas Walk of Fame in 2012, and in 2024 he took his place in the Arkansas Broadcasters Hall of Fame, a capstone recognition from the industry he had served for so long.

Behind the polished broadcasts was a man shaped profoundly by both joy and sorrow. While living in Hawaii, Sams endured the loss of his only son, Billy Jack Jr., in a small-plane accident that he himself survived. He often spoke of how that grief deepened rather than broke his Christian faith, and for decades afterward he shared his testimony in churches and community gatherings across Arkansas, offering encouragement to others carrying their own burdens. A longtime member of Immanuel Baptist Church, he sang in the choir and gave his time freely. After many a newscast, he slipped quietly over to Arkansas Children's Hospital to rock babies in the nursery, seeking no audience and no credit.

The tributes from those who knew him best spoke to the man behind the legend. "There are broadcasters, and then there are legends. Today, Arkansas lost one of the very best," Brannon said, remembering Sams in remarks shared by THV11 as "my colleague, my mentor, but most importantly, my friend." Richardson, who sat beside him for fifteen years, said he had become "so much more than a co-worker," calling him "my best friend and a treasured part of my family."

B.J. Sams measured his work not in ratings or honors but in the trust he earned, one morning at a time, from the people who let him into their homes before the coffee had cooled. He gave central Arkansas more than the news. He gave it a familiar, reassuring companion through ordinary days and difficult ones alike, and he carried the same quiet decency off camera, whether testifying to his faith or cradling a child who would never know his name. In a profession that prizes the fleeting moment, he leaves something lasting: a standard of kindness and constancy that the generations of Arkansas broadcasters who follow him will measure themselves against for years to come.